Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) by Delia Ephron Read Free Book Online Page B

my first book,
The Adventurous Crocheter
. My friend illustrated it and I wrote it. Well, “writing” is an overstatement for what I was doing, mostly instructions for how to make purses, belts, and sweaters. At this point it was dawning on me that I have one life—dawning not in an abstract way, which was the way I’d always understood it, but like a brick falling on my head. There wasn’t an actual brick—by that I mean there was no eureka. It didn’t happen on a birthday. I didn’t see someone on the street that I didn’t want to be in ten years or someone that I did. Partly you can fake being someone you’re not for only so long, although it’s easier if you don’t know who you are to begin with. Partly thirty coming at me made this impossible to ignore: I had one life and I was fucking it up. (A caveat: I didn’t think I was fucking it up, even though that’s what I was doing, because we didn’t use the word
fuck
in the seventies the way we do now every thirty seconds.) I had one life and I was screwing it up. That realization didn’t make me brave, but brave enough to take some baby steps.
    While I was writing a second book,
Gladrags
, again mainly instructions, this time about remaking clothes—still mining the pioneer woman fantasy—a bigger dream was surfacing that had to do with the real me. I said tomy husband—my first husband, that’s important here—I said to him, “You know, I really think I’d like to try to be a writer.”
    And he said, “I don’t want you to be a writer.”
    And I said, “Why?”
    And he said, “I don’t want you to be famous. Suppose you become famous?”
    And I said, “I promise I won’t be famous.”
    I wonder to this day, because I am a faithful sort of person, if I did keep that promise. But obviously if your husband wants to crush your tender dream with his big fat foot (even if you’re Jane Powell), you have to leave him. So I did.
    We sold our house and made a modest profit. If I lived cheaply, I figured that I had two years to become a writer.
    (It is only now that I realize that this ambition/drive/bravery to become a writer surfaced
after
I had written one book and was in the middle of a second. I suppose I didn’t consider my craft writing “writing.” I still don’t. But I am very attached to
The Adventurous Crocheter
. I know some of it by heart. “There is no wrong way to crochet. There are easier ways and harder ways, but any way is right as long as the work looks and acts like crocheting.” The reason I remember these lines is that, while myhusband was telling me he didn’t want me to become a writer, I recited them to myself silently like a mantra blocking his voice.)
    So, my plan—two years. In two years I had to become a self-supporting writer. Otherwise I’d have to find something else to do. It’s important to have a plan when one is creating that much upheaval. Nevertheless, I was terrified. My marriage hadn’t been nurturing or even supportive, but it was secure. Now I was flying blind. Fortunately I was moving back to New York City and the loving care of my girlfriends.
    My friend Lorrie met me at Penn Station. We went up to my friend Susan’s, where Lorrie made me dinner—she always made amazing food, had actually baked my three-tiered wedding cake, and now was making me a divorce salad, as I recall with shrimp. Susan, who had been my college roommate, was happy to have me camp forever on her pullout couch, but she was of such a generous nature that soon there were three more living there (I was the only one getting divorced or it would have been a television series). The building took offense and we had to move out.
    I then moved up to my friend Jean’s large apartment on the Upper West Side. Jean had replaced her couches with hammocks that swung from the living room ceiling.That wasn’t a problem, although it was strange visually and meant if you shared a hammock with someone, you were practically having sex. Her